My name's Tahni and I pronounce it Tar-nee. Heaps of people call me Taheeni which can be really frustrating. It can also mean Valley in Japanese and it's the name of a white feather used in traditional American Indian female ceremonies.

Primarily, because all the Tahnees I've come across seem to be Australian. And in an Australian accent, Tahnee does not sound like Tawny. Somebody commented above about Tahnee being Polynesian, I have also heard it might come from an Indian word. I reckon an Asian source is likely, considering proximity to Australia.

Of course, for all I know, there are hundreds of American Tahnees who pronounce Tawny the same way and that's where they got their name.

I wonder if there have been any high-profile Tahnees that kickstarted the name?

This cannot be pronounced TAW-nee; it's spelt TAHN-ee. Whatever way I say it, it doesn't sound like Tawny. I wonder what genius came up with this diabolical "spelling" of a nice, but slightly common, name. The word in English is "tawny", so why spell it any other way? It looks like a nickname for "Tan" or something; could lead to the singing of the surprisingly catchy "Come out ye black and tans". (That's what I would immediately think of.)

-- Anonymous User 3/10/2009

This name is not rare in Australia. I've met quite a few girls born in the 80's and early 90's called Tahnee, all of whom pronounce it Tah-nee. It makes sense to me that it's a Polynesian name as a girl I know named Tahnee is part Polynesian and the other Tahnees I know of have a Pacific Island or Aboriginal look. I think it sounds cute and pretty but is a bit ditzy and suits a child better than it does an adult.

I don't know what a British Columbia accent (as I assume the owner of this site has) does with ah/aw, but we seem to have here a lot of confusion because of the ah/aw merger.

There are many Americans who have lost the distinction between "ah" and "aw" and pronounce them identically. Unlike many other dialect variations, this one isn't traced to just one part of the country but occurs in several widely spaced areas. One can say that the great majority of younger people in southern California, Washington state, and western Pennsylvania around Pittsburgh have lost the distinction, but that most Americans in the deep South still have it. Elsewhere it often is unpredictable and changes from family to family as to whether "ah" and "aw" have merged.

People who have this merger as part of their dialect usually can't even hear the difference between "ah" and "aw" when someone who does make the distinction is speaking.

Does this really come from Tawny? Amazing, in a weird kind of way. I don't get what's wrong with Tawny, though, since it's a nice name and not popular enough for us to start spelling it differently (not that I'm aware of any kind of benchmark; I just noticed that the most popular names tend to have alternate spellings.